Today is Saturday, August 11, 2007. School starts Monday and I am hiding out in my air conditioned home office. A must have (air conditioning that is) when you live in Phoenix. Today is the day I test StarOffice 8.0 with the Weblog Publisher add on.

Conditions: I am working on a Virtual PC running Windows XP with 350 megabytes of RAM allocated to the virtual machine.

As much as I would love to give you a full evaluation of StarOffice 8.0 today, time just doesn't permit that. Therefore, I am going to concentrate on what I was asked, evaluate blog Publishing with Sun Weblog Publisher.

Starting at the beginning I installed StarOffice 8.0 from the CD supplied by Danny. Next I downloaded the Sun Weblog Publisher from my e-mail. (This too was supplied by Danny.) This is where I hit my first challenge as there was a slight difference between the supplied installation instructions and how it really works. Have no fear, I will share with you what I have learned.

It is just easy to use. I set my formatting the way I wanted in StarOffice Writer 8.0 and published. The formatting came across in the blog along with my hyperlinks. That doesn't always happen when I paste my entries in using the blogger.com interface.

Really I have only two complaints about this product and the first is so minor it is not hardly worth mentioning. However, I did say I would evaluate this product.

The directions for installation were not clear. They were close enough that I was successful with a bit of hunting but that could be a frustration for some. The second thing that bothered me is the fact my images didn't publish. In reality, I published this post twice. The first time to see the process so I could write about it. The second time was the finished product. What I discovered is my images, which were screen captures, didn't upload. That is some what frustrating considering the image on the Sun Web site shows a person publishing a picture to their blog. (See image below. :) )

If my opinion mattered... I would like to see this product give the option of adding Technorati tags to the post as part of the publishing process.